Fighting fit
Law series The Good Fight is back for a sixth season of courtroom drama, politics and boss-employee tension.
The Good Fight
Season 6 Mondays (From 5 December) M-Net (*101) 22:00
The Good Fight promised drama, drama, drama when it started airing six years ago, spinning off from hit legal series
The Good Wife. Taking up the lead was Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski, Dr Hofstadter in comedy series The Big Bang Theory), who went from Good Wife law firm boss to disrespected junior, fighting for her every dollar. She lost her fortune in a Ponzi Scheme and was forced to go back to work with the pleb lawyers and start over.
“She has had the rug pulled out from under her,” says Christine, who signed on to reprise her Good Wife character without reading a script. “The writers told me that Diane would be starting from scratch and working at the only place that would hire her –a black law firm. It’s transformed from a simple legal-based series to something of a social movement, confronting issues like white supremacy, racism, sexism, human rights and the system that are all prevalent in the modern world.”
KICKING UP THE DIRT
Season 5 saw Diane’s world change when she married ballistics expert Kurt McVeigh (Gary Cole, Kent Davison in the political comedy series Veep) marry, while managing partner Adrian
Boseman (Delroy Lindo, Bass Reeves in drama film The Harder They Fall) left law firm Reddick, Boseman & Lockhart. This meant that Diane – a white woman whose husband isn’t necessarily on the liberal side of politics – is now heading up the black firm.
“Diane has never gone down without a fight. That’s the point of the title – the good fight. And she is championing this now more than ever,” explains Christine. “She has however done a few questionable things, like using her wealthy racist clients to her advantage. This was a problem for partner lawyer Liz (Audra McDonald, Naomi Bennett in legal drama series Private Practice).”
“I love that there’s a struggle and there were missteps, because going forward as a country and as people, we’re going to make a lot of missteps along the way until we really learn how to work this out,” says Christine, emphasising how the storylines are inspired by real life.
NEW PARTNERSHIPS
“I used to believe in progress; that we learnt from our mistakes. But I feel like I’m back where I was six years ago,” Diane says to Dr Lyle Bettencourt (John Slattery, Roger Sterling in period drama series Mad Men), a new character who Diane confides in.
“The upcoming season will see Diane feeling as if she is going crazy and struggling with an uneasy sense of déjà vu. It’s going to be difficult for her,” adds Christine, saying that “the lawyers of Reddick & Associates wonder if the violence that they see all around them points to an impending civil war.”
Liz will also find coalition with flamboyant attorney Ri’Chard Lane (Andre Braugher, Captain Raymond Holt in cop comedy series Brooklyn Nine-Nine), who joins the firm as a new partner and wants to focus on “branding” in the public space so as to steal Diane’s thunder.
ANXIETY ATTACK
Diane and Liz will be interacting more this season on a personal level. “Do you ever worry we are going to lose everything?”, “What The firm?”, “And the entire country,” say the pair in a wine-fuelled exchange. “It’s going to be big – the season has the backdrop of riots and protests, political unrest and even forces of nature like a hurricane that struck Florida on the US East Coast earlier this year.
“This is our final season and will take us up to election night, which is uncanny,” says Christine. “Our season finale will capture election night with all of the anxiety and precipitous moment we are living through – the show takes us through that,” says the actress, adding that viewers will look back at how well the series represented the dystopian times we find ourselves in.